Johnny had just turned four last month and was very intent on proving that he was more independent than he had been before. But as Hunter sat on the coffee table and pulled his son to stand between his legs, the boy seemed small and fragile to him.
“So what did you do to yourself?” Hunter asked, surveying how his son had spruced himself up.
Johnny had flaming red hair that Hunter kept short on the sides and in back. But he let the barber leave a little on top and now Johnny had done something to make only the front part stick straight up.
Hunter lightly patted the stiff-looking tips with his palm. “How’d you do this?” he asked, careful to sound impartial so as not to offend what his son was clearly proud to have accomplished.
“My friend Mikey showed me. You wet your hair and then you kinda comb it up with the bar of soap till it stays. Then you let it get dry.”
That was a relief. Hunter was afraid he’d used super-glue.
“It makes you cool,” Johnny informed him.
“Cool,” Hunter repeated. “Uh-huh.”
Accepting the hairstyle for the moment, he lowered his gaze to his son’s chubby-cheeked face with the sprinkling of freckles across his tiny nose.
“And did you wash your face again since your bath?” he asked, surprised since it was always a struggle to get his son to wash his face once, let alone twice.
“I din’t wash it. I shaved just a little bit,” Johnny informed him, rubbing a hand along his peach-skin jawline.
“You must have pressed kind of hard,” Hunter observed. “Your cheeks are all red. You made sure you used the special razor I gave you, didn’t you? It’s more important than ever that you never touch mine, you know?”
“I know. ’Cuz yours has a really sharp thing in it and ’cuz of the hemolilia I got now.”
Hunter had tried to get him to pronounce hemophilia correctly but it was a losing battle.
“Right. And did you put some of the soap in your eyebrows to make them stand up, too?” Hunter asked, seeing that the pale brows over his son’s blueberries-and-cream colored eyes were going in all directions.
“No, I think they musta just getted that way when I dried off my face ’cuz the water in my hair dripped.”
“So can I fix them?”
Johnny nodded and Hunter licked his thumbs and smoothed his son’s eyebrows into place.
Then he glanced down at Johnny’s rodeo pajamas. And the way his son had accessorized them.
“That’s one of my best ties, isn’t it?”
“Yup. I wanted to look nice.”
“And you do,” Hunter assured him. He couldn’t stop the smile that escaped. The tie was knotted into a wad at his throat and hung nearly to his knees. “I’m just thinking that this might not be a necktie kind of night. See? I don’t have one on.”
“Maybe you should put one on.”
“I don’t think so. And you know, a tie is sort of fancy for pajamas. Even for the good rodeo pajamas.”
“I look nice,” Johnny insisted.
“You do. You do. I’m just thinking that our company might not have dressed up quite that much and we wouldn’t want her to feel bad, would we?”
Johnny creased his forehead and looked down at the striped tie. “We could tell her it was okay that she didn’t get dressed up good as us.”
“You really want to leave the tie on, huh?”
“Yup.”
Hunter nodded. He didn’t have the heart to force the issue. “Okay, then. Well, I guess since you’re all ready, you can help me get the rest of your toys put away so this place doesn’t look like a cyclone hit it.”
Apparently feeling dressed up made the little boy agreeable because he didn’t balk at that suggestion the way he usually did. Instead he turned and went right to work.
“Who’s this lady again?” Johnny asked as he picked up his toys.
Hunter hadn’t known how to explain Terese Warwick. Johnny knew he was adopted; Hunter and his wife had decided when he was still an infant that they would be open and honest with him on the subject. Despite that, the whole concept seemed slightly out of his grasp yet. Whenever they talked about it Johnny seemed only concerned with the fact that Hunter was his dad no matter what.
Hunter hadn’t wanted to confuse him by trying to explain that Terese Warwick was the sister of Johnny’s birth mother, so he’d opted for a more simple description. Which he repeated now.
“She’s a friend who knew you when you were only a baby, and she’s the person who has the same kind of blood that you have, so she gave you some of hers when you were in the hospital.”
“When I was bleedin’ on accounta the hemolilia.”
“When your nose was bleeding so badly because of the hemophilia, yes.”
“Is she your girlfriend like Mindy Harper wants to be my girlfriend and kiss me?” Johnny asked, being silly.
“When did Mindy Harper want to kiss you?”
“Before last week. At preschool. When we were havin’ graham crackers and yogurt. She told Mikey she loooved me and she wanted to kiss me and I said yuk.”
Again Hunter suppressed a smile. “No, the lady who’s coming to stay with us for a while is not my girlfriend and there won’t be any kissing going on. She’s just a friend who’s a girl. And really she’ll be here to see you more than to see me.”
“Oh, no!” Johnny shouted in a panic.
It was an indication of how on-edge Hunter still was about his son and his son’s health that that simple exclamation was enough to tense his entire body and make him spin around to face the boy.
But Johnny’s current crisis was far less distressing than the one the week before.
“I forgetted about my hair and put my hat on!” the little boy informed him, holding up his cowboy hat. “I gotta fix it!” Then he dashed back upstairs.
“Don’t put any more soap in it,” Hunter called after him. “Just use a little water if you have to.”
Hunter shook his head and laughed to himself at his son’s antics. Then he returned to straightening up the living room.
He knew that it wasn’t Terese Warwick herself that had Johnny so excited. The little boy didn’t know her, after all. It was merely the novelty of having someone come to stay with them.
Hunter, on the other hand, was a different story. For him it was the woman he was looking forward to seeing again. And he was none too happy about it.
In fact, wanting to see her again was what had caused him to drag his feet about calling her to arrange this visit.
Wanting to see any woman hadn’t happened to him since Margee. It sure as hell hadn’t happened to him since Margee’s death.
But with Terese Warwick it had happened. And it had Hunter feeling pretty unsettled. And confused. Why her, of all people? he kept asking himself.
Of course, she didn’t seem anything like her sister. But maybe the difference between them was actually the problem.
For all her money and high-class social circles, Terese still had a sort of girl-next-door thing going for her. And flashy, overly made-up, beauty-shop-perfect women—like Eve Warwick—put him off. Who wanted somebody who looked as if they needed to be kept on a pedestal and dusted once a week? Somebody who might as well have a hands-off sign posted